AMD Llano HTPC Builders Guide

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• ganeshts - Tuesday, June 5, 2012 - link

  I think one of the best scenarios to support this need is capture of high definition game play from a XBox or PS3.
  
  For most legal media, I also suggest grabbing at the encoded source :)

• ganeshts - Tuesday, June 5, 2012 - link

  I do agree about this being a niche market which the major companies wouldn't want to touch..
  
  I think there are some Hauppauge and AverMedia cards which do what you want (record to hard disk). They can always be burnt on to a Blu-ray if necessary.

• ImThat1Guy - Tuesday, June 5, 2012 - link

  I'm so confused in every way. Do any of you think you can explain? Or maybe just point my in the right direction and recommend a good one? I'd like to record maybe 2, 3 channels at a time (at maximum- usually not recording anything), and I have what I guess is standard US cable. The computer will function as a DVR-enabled cable box, correct?

• ganeshts - Tuesday, June 5, 2012 - link

  Definitely :) If you want to record premium content from cable, you will need a CableCard -- and that can help you effectively replace the cable-co supplied DVR box.
  
  I suggest you take a look at AVSForum for immediate guidance.

• ImThat1Guy - Tuesday, June 5, 2012 - link

  AVS Forum is down, at least for me.
  
  Would something like the Hauppauge WinTV HVR 1250 work, and work with Ubuntu and XBMC (or better yet UbuntuTV)?

• ImThat1Guy - Tuesday, June 5, 2012 - link

  No reply?

• ganeshts - Tuesday, June 5, 2012 - link

  It is down for 12 - 18 hours :) Patience please..

• Coup27 - Tuesday, June 5, 2012 - link

  Is there a reason why Lian Li's PC-Q07, or any of their other PC-Q range of enclosure's dont get much internet traction in these articles? They look to me as some of the most stylish ITX enclosures about.

• randinspace - Tuesday, June 5, 2012 - link

  From the conclusion:
  "High quality madVR rendering is not possible with the integrated GPU (it is not possible with the Intel Sandy Bridge HD 2000 / HD 3000 series either)."
  
  What's your definition of "high quality" here? I hadn't even dreamed of trying to utilize madVR with an APU until last week actually, but on my A8-3800 the more or less default settings for madVR in MPC-HC with LAV filters installed (long story short: I spent a day on Doom9), yields better results than CPU/software acceleration on otherwise large/annoying files...
  
  This is revealing a bit more about my tastes than I would like, but the "annoying files" I'm thinking of are episodes of anime encoded in 1080p at 10 bit color depth (AKA hi10/hi10p) with FLAC audio and as many as 4 subtitle streams (dialogue in english, background song in english, karaoke for said song in both romanized japanese and actual japanese...) displaying at a time during a flashback (grainy filtering placed over the top of everything) scene. On my old junk setup I would occasionally have to turn the subtitles off even in (really poorly encoded) 720p in order to avoid MASSIVE lag, but madVR runs anything I throw at it with a few caveats:
  
  (images safe for work, BTW)
  
  http://bayimg.com/aapGDaaDA madVR, windowed even though it doesn't particularly like being run in windowed mode in order to display the AMD sysmonitor readout. Feel free to note the 0 dropped frames, but ignore the delayed frames which were almost entirely resultant from PEBKAC as I kept hitting pause break instead of prtscn and had to reload the scene a bunch of times until I realized it...
  
  http://bayimg.com/aaPGBAADa same scene in EVR (with xy-VSFilter for subtitles so I don't have to resort to EVR custom Pres./MPC-HC's internal subtitle renderer).
  
  Note the ridiculous gulf in GPU utilization between the two scenarios (also that I probably should've upgraded my RAM instead of buying an SSD). I can't do math since I majored in Liberal Arts, but a 12% load when the GPU is chilling out at 282 mhz (as low as it clocks itself while still running, I believe) is obviously better than 76% load at 600mhz which causes the cpu/apu fan to all but max out. I can only imagine how loud this would get with the 95-100w+ (through overclocking) APUs, and quite frankly madVR doesn't look THAT much better than EVR when you're using the same (LAV) filters otherwise.
  
  Still, after setting things up I ran all kinds of crap I had (which I suppose is an important distinction from all kinds of crap period) using madVR to check for stability and never saw GPU usage go too far past 80% for long, and more typically saw numbers in the 40-70% range which again I could see as being a bit below ideal depending on one's intended hardware configuration (noisy fans, aiming for low temps to stick with passive cooling, etc.). Conversely GPU usage in madVR is unsurprisingly much more comfortable when rendering standard/8-bit color depth encodes than hi10p, in 720p files instead of 1080p, etc. but the entire point of having the hardware in the first place is making the most of it yeah?
  
  Of course either way I never watch anything that surpasses the baseline 24x FPS (because Japanese are cheap :P) so if your definition of "high quality" is above that (I'd certainly be bummed if I spent a lot of money having my wedding digitally filmed and encoded in 1080p60p and then couldn't play it back on the TV with my usual profile...) then fair enough. I just found the comment unusual since I considered my experience with madVR to be a relatively pleasant one. More importantly was my realization that if desktop A8 Llano could run madVR then it seemed to follow that (particularly at 720p) mobile Trinity would be able to. Obviously the downside of mobile Trinity is going to be the junk ram and so/so audio that one finds in laptops, but madVR running at 35 or potentially even 17watts? If you're crazier than me (bought an HP Pavilion desktop just to get my hands on an A8-3800) and can't wait for the desktop parts I could see a case made (literally) for gutting a ~$5-600 laptop for the sake of building a low profile HTPC...
  
  Pfft... now that I think about it, I suppose this is ultimately one of those "posts from an irate reader who has other requirements" that you were trying to avoid. I'm not really irate though, just loquacious and taking the opportunity to procrastinate from editing...

• ganeshts - Tuesday, June 5, 2012 - link

  Your post is quite informative :) In fact, these sorts of comments are what makes AnandTech articles even better for the rest of the readers out there.
  
  madVR vs. EVR : For all Llano lovers out there, better learn not to fall in love with madVR :) Personally, I don't mind either of the renderers (and actually love EVR because it is so lean on the system resources).
  
  You caught me out on the point that the iGPUs are not good enough for HQ madVR rendering. I should have qualified that with the fact that HQ madVR rendering is not advisable with the Llanos for interlaced videos.
  
  Can you repeat your tests with some 480i60 / even 720p60 (where 720p must get upscaled in both luma and chroma components to 1080p) / 1080i60 content (quite common in US broadcast recordings) ? I believe the iGPUs should start to hiccup under those circumstances.